France to prosecute its drug regulator and Servier in scandal over diabetes drug

France’s drug regulator and one of its leading drug companies, Servier, will stand trial as legal persons over the marketing of the antidiabetes and weight loss drug benfluorex (marketed in France as Mediator), which is believed to have killed between 500 and 2300 people before being pulled from the market in 2009.1

Joining them will be nine other institutional defendants, many of them affiliates of Servier, and 14 people, including the company’s former vice president, civil servants, a former senator accused of watering down an official report on the drug, and a professor of paediatrics retained by Servier who is accused of suborning the senator.

Benfluorex is very similar to fenfluramine, a component of the …